America Needs a New Labor Movement

Why Worker's Won't Unite

"So far, though, the fraught future of labor in the U.S. has notably failed to generate public protest on a significant scale. Nothing in American politics compares with the civil-rights crusade, the movement against the Vietnam War, or the labor wars of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Could that change? Might the future possibly hold a resurgence of the indignation about class disparities—and about the labor and economic circumstances they reflect—that was once focused on the workplace?

Today, the labor movement’s decline is widely considered an irreversible reality—the inevitable outcome of globalization and automation, and the norm for a postindustrial economy, hardly worthy of comment. When discussions turn to the glaring and still growing imbalance of power between working-class and elite interests in our political system, Republicans celebrate the free market and certainly don’t invoke a return of unions. But neither do most Democrats. Why this is so, why it’s a problem, and what if anything might be done to revive the politics of work—these issues are the subject of two very different books: the historian Steve Fraser’s The Age of Acquiescence and Only One Thing Can Save Us, by Thomas Geoghegan, a longtime labor attorney."

This is because both parties, are for the wealthy and sold off to the mega-corporations. The Democrat party has already forsaken the working class and below and even with Hillary's loss, I do not see any changes. I have seen a few bloggers and others speak of a "new progressive" movement or the "alt-left" but they seem to be just on the fringes. The wealthy are running both, and they don't want the workers to unite. It seems to me people who are poor or working class in America, are so divided via race and other divisions, and so beaten down, and fearful of their survival, that worker's rights are being basically stripped away. The "free market" is a joke. There's no such thing as that unicorn in this world, freedom for the most rich who can buy their way out of rules and regulations. One thing I worry about is that expectations have sunk so low, that most have subscribed to the "dog eat dog" ethos, I see this all the time on Facebook where the hatred for the poor has grown. They got working class people more busy beating up on the "deadbeats" on welfare and disability--notice how Trump has focused on the most vulnerable in society rather then wondering why their wages haven't gone up in 20 years.

One can see the REGRESSION when it comes to the work world. There's no bright future. They cling to the ideals of the 19th century and wish to strip away the hard won rights of the 20th. I hope young people especially millennials wake up before it is too late. Sadly too many subscribe to Social Darwinism for the new American Hunger Games.